Ksenia Fadeyeva, an ally to the imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was sentenced to nine years in prison for alleged extremist activities by a Siberian court on Friday.
Fadeyeva is the former head of Navalny’s local headquarters in the city of Tomsk, where she also served as city council member. On Friday, she was sentenced to 9 years in prison and fined about €5,000. The court charged her with alleged activities in an extremist organisation while holding her official position, according to Mediazona.
“What happened in this trial has nothing to do with justice. We’ve actually been bullied for the last week. The defense was limited in the stage of presenting evidence,” Fadeyeva’s lawyer said after the trial on Friday, according to Mediazona.
The state prosecution — which demanded a 10.5 year prison term for Fadeyeva — was allowed to present “months of evidence over more than 25 court hearings,” but Fadeyeva’s defense team only had “four days to present evidence,” her lawyer said.
Fadeyeva was detained in December 2021, after a Moscow court declared Navalny’s political group, the Anti-Corruption Foundation an “extremist” political network and banned all of their activities in June 2021. In January 2022 Fadeyeva was put on Russia’s list of terrorists.
“Ksenia did not commit any crime, she is a brave politician who has been fighting against Putin’s corrupt regime. She has to be free,” Navalny’s Anti Corruption Foundation said last week.
The sentence comes after Navalny launched his election campaign to vote for anyone but incumbent President Vladimir Putin in March’s election. Shortly after the launch, Navalny disappeared for three weeks while being relocated to another prison colony above the Arctic Circle.
In August, Navalny was sentenced to an additional 19 years in a maximum-security prison.
